ROCS International (Restore Oysters for Climate Sustainability) is a climate sustainability nonprofit that believes that the first and most important approach is a massive effort aimed at restoring Oyster reefs and providing shoreline habitat for corals, crabs, shrimp, plankton, and other calcifying shellfish.
The most environmentally friendly method to capture carbon and decrease global warming.
Benefits the environment in many ways and functions as a major carbon dioxide sink.
Our approach aims to maximize the production of shell and therefore removal of CO2 from the atmosphere in our world’s oceans.
ROCS International (Restore Oysters for Climate
Sustainability) is a nonprofit that believes that the first and
most important approach is a massive effort aimed at restoring Oyster
reefs and providing shoreline habitat for corals, crabs, shrimp,
plankton, and other calcifying shellfish. This is because 90% of
many of these creatures have been eliminated from the worlds’ shoreline
habitats.
The sole purpose will be the support and finance of these efforts
which are already underway, and those that will be established in
the future deemed by the board of directors to be eligible for assistance.
The focus will be on restoration of Oysters because the technology
is available and is currently underfunded. It is hoped that this
company will be abler to scale up these efforts to help restore
the coast to its former glory when trillions of Oysters, Crabs,
Scallops, Echinoderms and all of the abundant life of the coastal
reefs to their pristine state of 300-400 years ago.
Second, we plan to explore new ways to quantitate the amount of
shell produced in those areas where shell is produced, farmed, or
restored, so that the results of our efforts may be more easily
quantified to establish the amount of carbon removed from the ocean
and consequently, the atmosphere which is in equilibrium with it.
This, if done properly, should sequester billions of tons of carbon
dioxide into shell and subsequently act as a sink to pull it from
the atmosphere!
Importantly, it does not matter if a citizen does or doesn’t like
Oysters, their harvest can be used as a source of high-quality supplements
and feed for other animals as the shellfish meat has unsaturated
fat and is high in omega-3 fatty acids. In addition, those left
in situ will contribute the most to CO2 reduction.
Most importantly is that this elegant model for the removal of Carbon
Dioxide should be embraced by all political parties and scientists.
Who would not want to reestablish our shoreline habitats, improve
fisheries, and support coral, while benefiting from the natural
filtration and purification of our oceans? The main point of this
paper is that we need to produce shell from all organisms that make
it because calcium carbonate or limestone is 40% carbon dioxide
and that is in equilibrium with the atmosphere!
Planetary Bioengineering is the process
by which living things that did arise on this planet have been
modifying their habitats on earth since they first appeared.
Defined as: “Modifications that include the greening of
earth by photosynthetic organisms, which turned a predominantly
reducing atmosphere into an oxidizing one, the consequent precipitation
of iron oxides into iron ore strata, and the formation of huge
deposits of limestone by calcifying organisms.
Our approach aims to maximize the production
of shells and therefore removal of CO2 from the
atmosphere in our world’s oceans. First, Ocean calcifying
organisms form calcium carbonate / limestone in their shells
using CO2 from the atmosphere in equilibrium
with the surface Ocean.
Our primary goal will be to generate more shells for both
harvest and restoration. Most harvest would be from accepted
farming methods whereas restoration will use the application
of calcium carbonate and shell to rebuild reefs, thus magnifying
the effect of establishing further shell and so forth. Although
science is still being done on restoration, methods for
restoration have been used for hundreds of years.
We propose to establish essential infrastructure
by acquiring funding through governments, donations, NGOs,
and nonprofits, to direct funding to those on the front
lines to change the paradigm to re-establish the reefs and
the bivalve population.
Therefore, even though our primary goal is re-establishment
of coastal calcifying organisms in the United States and
in the World at large, our secondary goal is as important
or more important as the first!
Established oyster beds/reefs were
fished out in the 18th and 19th centuries by dredging to
harvest oysters as cheap human food for the growing cities
of North America and Europe. By the early 1900’s, 90% of
oyster beds had been fished out. At that time New Yorker’s
ate an average of 300 oysters per year purchased on the
street. Now they eat 3 per year because they are expensive,
rare, and small. Production was also diminished for both
fisheries and Oysters by pollution due to sewage outflows
and oil spills.
Before this, there were untold trillions of oysters which
cleared water, removed carbon dioxide, and encouraged abundant
wildlife. Oyster shells are 38% carbon dioxide. Clearly,
a large part of the decline in production is also due to
the habit of not returning the shell into the Ocean to provide
the natural alkalinization and structure for new shell formation.
Shell has been used for road construction, landfill, and
calcium feed supplement. By far the best thing to do with
waste shells is return them to the seabed where the scraps
of flesh that remain can feed scavengers and detritus-feeders
and the shells contribute to reef formation.
Since most people are not familiar
with the carbon cycle on earth, we need to educate non-scientists
that this is the most rapid way and perhaps the only way
that sufficient carbon dioxide can be removed from the atmosphere.
This will require a concerted effort to educate the public
and the world of the importance of this single effort to
reduce carbon dioxide in the ocean and atmosphere.
The re-establishment of coastal calcifying life starting
with oysters (and clams, mussels etc) is the most important
step that the world can take to mitigate climate change.
Much of the infrastructure is already in place, and more
importantly, because of the lack of time until climate change
cannot be mitigated sufficiently by other methods of carbon
capture and storage. The re-establishment of oyster beds
and other calcifying organisms must be scaled up 100 times
that which is going on now. Man has had great accomplishments
in the past and when we are all on the same page with a
defined goal, we can achieve wonders including planetary
engineering on a vast scale.
This will require world cooperation and leadership. We feel
that the reason this has not been done already is because
the formation of calcium carbonate is a “decomposition”
reaction that gives off one carbon dioxide for each one
sequestered. This is not reason enough not to do it because
the carbon dioxide is still in the ocean and is taken up
by another oyster and another until trillions of tons are
sequestered for millions of years.
Climate sustainability is a growing and profitable business model. ROCS International has a solid approach to non profit efforts to restore of coastal reefs & bi-valve species.
A global effort to return and maintain the earth's atmospheric
carbon dioxide to pre-industrial levels.
Learn More about Planetary Bioengineering
Ocean alkalinization is an approach to carbon removal that
involves adding alkaline substances to seawater to enhance the
ocean’s natural carbon sink. These substances could include
minerals, such as olivine, or artificial substances, such as
lime or some industrial byproducts. Adding alkalinity to the
ocean removes carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere
through a series of reactions that convert dissolved CO2
into stable bicarbonate and carbonate molecules, which in turn
causes the ocean to absorb more CO2 from the air
to restore equilibrium.
Source:
https://www.american.edu/sis/centers/carbon-removal/fact-sheet-ocean-alkalinization.cfm
Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is a way of reducing carbon
emissions, which could be key to helping to tackle global warming.
It’s a three-step process, involving: capturing the carbon dioxide
produced by power generation or industrial activity, such as
steel or cement making; transporting it; and then storing it
deep underground [source:
https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/what-is-ccs-how-does-it-work].
We have compared the potential of our proposed blue
carbon biotechnology using ocean calcifiers with these
artificial/industrial CO2 CCS solutions and we find
that industrial CCS facilities deliver, at considerable
cost, nothing more than captured CO2, for
which safe, reliable, long-term storage (so far untested, of
course), must be engineered at even further cost. Compare this
with aquaculture enterprises cultivating shell
to capture and store atmospheric CO2 permanently
that also provide nutritious food
and perform many ecosystem services like water filtration,
biodeposition, denitrification, enhanced biodiversity, reef
building, shoreline stabilisation and wave
management.
It’s true that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change Special Report of 2018 (PDF download:
https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/download/) did
recommended planting 1 billion hectares of forest as a means
to limit global warming to 1.5°C by 2050. Sadly, the existing
state of affairs is that Earth does not have enough
agricultural land for all its human
inhabitants to enjoy an affluent diet (as that is presently
defined). And all of the many proposals to plant more trees
involve turning agricultural land into forest, rather than farmland
suitable for producing grain crops. Even more unfortunate is
that recent research suggests that tree planting on a massive
scale is not the panacea we need. Indeed, putting such plans
into effect could do more harm than good.
(Friggens et al. 2020, Tree planting in organic soils does
not result in net carbon sequestration on decadal timescales,
https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.15229;
Goswami 2020, Relying on forests to achieve net zero targets
not a good idea, and scientists agree,
https://tinyurl.com/2phdmjs4;
Heilmayr et al. 2020, Impacts of Chilean forest subsidies
on forest cover, carbon and biodiversity,
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-0547-0;
Hong et al. 2020, Divergent responses of soil organic carbon
to afforestation,
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-0557-y;
Moore et al. 2023, Assessment of the Potential Value for
Climate Remediation of Ocean Calcifiers in Sequestration of
Atmospheric Carbon,
https://rocsinternational.com/resources/Assessment-ocean-calcifiers-carbon-sequester-PREPRINT.pdf.
We understand this concern. At present shellfish are cultivated for the meat (the shell is food-waste) and the industry is scaled according to that market. And that’s exactly why we say we must change the paradigm: cultivate the bivalves, and those other shellfish, to sequester permanently CO2 from the atmosphere and accept the food as a marketable by-product. Don’t lose sight of the fact that shellfish farming is unique. Bivalves and other shellfish are the only actively farmed organisms in which a third to a half of the weight of the harvest is crystalline, chemically stable, calcium carbonate made from atmospheric CO2. We estimate that today’s global aquaculture farming is removing about 5.5 million tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere each year. We must create a market for selling that (i.e. the permanent removal of carbon from the atmosphere) as an offset to the polluters responsible for fossil CO2 emissions. So, for our “new generation shellfish farms” the principal saleable product is the sequestered carbon in the shells. This will be sold on the carbon market as an independently guaranteed offset for CO2-polluters/emitters; these carbon sales will pay for the whole operation. Shellfish meat then becomes a nutritious by-product to be sold as a bonus for the farming operation. Any shellfish meat that exceeds the needs of the “shellfish-delicacy” market is still a healthy and highly nutritious food. It can be sold into markets for processed human food, and even for animal farms and, especially, fish farms which always have difficulty in finding enough healthy nutrients for their cultured fish.
Yes, it is correct. The ocean absorbs about 30% of the CO2 released into the atmosphere. Ocean calcifiers react two hydrogencarbonate ions with a calcium ion on the surface of the enzyme carbonic anhydrase. A molecule of calcium carbonate is made with one hydrogencarbonate ion and is released into the “bioceramic assembly process” that makes the shell crystals [Evans, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1002/pmic.201900036]. The remnants of the second hydrogencarbonate ion, essentially a CO2 molecule, is rehydrated by the enzyme for use in the next round of calcification. The source of both of those hydrogencarbonate ions is atmospheric CO2, either through CO2 reacting with water to form carbonic acid (which dissociates), or from metabolism of food-derived organic carbon (ALL of which on this planet is derived from photosynthetic fixation of atmospheric CO2). For the scientific details check out Moore et al. 2023, "https://rocsinternational.com/resources/Assessment-ocean-calcifiers-carbon-sequester-PREPRINT.pdf.
Ocean acidification is caused by the uptake of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and as we emit more fossil CO2, so the oceans will change from alkaline to acid pH. Experiments have indeed demonstrated significant changes in mussel (Mytilus edulis) shells cultured in acidified water, BUT these experiments used CO2 concentrations that were 2½ times higher than present, and not expected to be reached in our oceans for a century or so. Thankfully, today’s oceans are still decidedly alkaline on average (around pH 8); they have not yet been acidified to the extent that the water affects the crystalline calcium carbonate in shellfish shells. If we can take control of CO2 emissions, we will also control ocean acidity. For the scientific details check out Moore et al. 2023, https://rocsinternational.com/resources/Assessment-ocean-calcifiers-carbon-sequester-PREPRINT.pdf.
Yeah, we’ve met those guys, too! Our usual response to this criticism is that the geochemist’s calcifying reaction scheme shows that two bicarbonate ions (which ultimately were derived from the atmosphere) react with Ca ions and one of them is precipitated as CaCO3, and the other one released as CO2. So, it is illogical to claim that returning one out of two carbons to the environment is a “major way by which CO2 is returned to the atmosphere” as some ocean chemists have put it to us. Apart from simple arithmetic, a much more fundamental counter to these interpretations of ocean geochemistry is that consideration of calcifying organisms must take into account their biochemistry and enzymology. Geochemistry deals with carbonate chemistry in circumstances in which water surfaces are in equilibrium with the open atmosphere. In biological carbonate chemistry this circumstance cannot apply. The chemistry that we call LIFE is specifically isolated from the open water environment of the geochemist. Rather, the biological reaction takes place on the surfaces of enzymatic polypeptides, within organelles with ion-selective phospholipid membranes, contained in a cell enclosed by phospholipid bilayer membranes. Ignoring what is known about the biology, physiology, and molecular cell biology of living calcifiers leads to the geochemist’s erroneous conclusions and deficient advice about the potential for calcifier biotechnology to contribute to atmosphere remediation. For the scientific details check out Moore et al. 2023, https://rocsinternational.com/resources/Assessment-ocean-calcifiers-carbon-sequester-PREPRINT.pdf. We usually refer the respected scientists that make this criticism to their last (or next) plate of oysters or moules marinière, asking what s/he thinks those shells left over after the meal are made of. It’s solidified atmosphere guys, that’s what it is.
Yes, we know that all of that is a problem, that’s why we want to CHANGE IT. We need an international secretariat with the international political authority, the international funding, and a focussed administration to drive it all forward around the entire globe. Nobody expects it to be easy; but failure means that Homo sapiens stands a good chance of being just another species driven to extinction by humanity’s folly.
Bear with me while I try to estimate that. Most shellfish
farming uses the shoreline and continental shelf and there is
enormous scope for the shellfish sector to grow in those regions,
let alone in the open sea. The continental shelves around our
land masses cover an area of about 32 million km2, which, according
to the Blue Habitats website [https://www.bluehabitats.org/?page_id=1660]
is only about 9% of the surface area of the world’s oceans.
If we aim to install bivalve farms in just 10% of continental
shelf waters (= around 1% of the area of ocean) we would have
a grand global total of 3 million km2 of bivalve farms. There
are 100 hectares in a square kilometer. So, what we need to
do is establish the expected yield per hectare of shellfish
from farms in these 300-million hectares of coastal waters.
We base our estimates of how much shellfish we could anticipate
cultivating on production data in the 2022 report of the (European
Union’s) Aquaculture Advisory Council (AAC) entitled Recommendation
on Carbon Sequestration by Molluscs [URL for PDF download:
https://tinyurl.com/57uzu5ks]
which shows the shellfish tonnage (comprising oysters,
mussels and clams) marketed
in the European Union (EU) in 2019. This report addresses two
important points about real-world shellfish farms
which would affect planning decisions. Firstly,
the average content of meat in harvested bivalves varies between
species. The report showing that in the European markets of
2019 this value was 8.5% of the live weight in oysters,
25% of the live weight in mussels and 14% of
the live weight in clams. For the industry
we advocate, aimed at cultivating shell
for the carbon-offset market, the inverse of these
meat-to-shell values are more important: namely, in oysters,
91.5% of the live weight is shell; in mussels, 75% of the live
weight is shell; in clams, 86% of the live weight is shell.
This is one reason why, elsewhere on this website, restorative
aquaculture of oysters is emphasised (a second
reason is that native oysters were virtually fished to extinction
in both US and European waters during the 19th century [see
Moore et al, 2021, DOI:
https://doi.org/10.29267/mxjb.2021.6.1.31].
Secondly, the AAC report points out that in
addition “to the volume of shells at consumer level, the
volume of farmed shell debris must be added”.
This shell debris is part of the harvest and
results from bivalve mortality during cultivation and, expressed
as a percentage of live weight of the harvest, is estimated
as 25% for oysters, 20% for mussels and 4% for clams. We bring
this feature to attention but will not add this complication
to our approximate calculations.
The two most productive areas for bivalve aquaculture are
Galicia and Southern Chile, where huge (natural)
upwellings of nutrient-rich waters take place. Approximately
75 tonnes per hectare of shellfish meat can
be harvested in these locations. But these are maximised yields
(about 10x better than non-enriched waters); and, apart from
noting the yield enhancement that can be achieved, we avoid
using data from two such special coastal regions and will use
instead a much more representative example of a rope-cultured
mussel farm which is being established in the English Channel
off Lyme Bay, England. Offshore Shellfish Ltd [https://offshoreshellfish.com/]
is building what will be the largest offshore farm for the blue
mussel (Mytilus edulis) in European waters. Across three sites,
the farm will cover a total area of 15.4 square km (= 1540 hectare)
and produce a grand total of around 10,000 tonnes of live mussels
per year. That yield = 6.5 tonnes per hectare of live
mussels, comprising, say, 1.5 tonne per hectare
meat and 5 tonne per hectare shells.
Consequently, the 300-million hectares of coastal waters we
advocate populating with new bivalve farms of similar efficiency
(10% of global continental shelf waters, remember), could yield
approximately 1.5 billion tonnes of shell.
That shell-limestone represents about 180 million tons
of atmospheric carbon being permanently removed
from the atmosphere annually. This is about
1.8% of the estimated 10 billion tonnes
of (fossil) carbon emitted globally in 2022. We believe
that this is a desirable effort to undertake (with appropriate
finance, we could start tomorrow), which still only expects
to use 1% of the ocean’s area and could be expanded eventually
to make serious reductions in the overall excess CO2
burden of the atmosphere.
Another approach towards predicting our future starts with the
global harvest of 17.7 million tonnes of (live) mollusks, mostly
bivalves, reported by FAOStat 2022 [https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#home].
Using the averaged 6.6 : 1 ratio of shell :
meat we can calculate from the EU production data shown above
for oysters, mussels and clams, this current
global yield of live animals is equivalent to 2.33
million tonnes of meat and 15.37 million tonnes of shell.
In other words, the present-day aquaculture industry
already permanently sequesters 1.84
million tonnes of carbon each year. But this is an
industry governed by food markets. Change the
paradigm to cultivation of shell; sell the permanently sequestered
carbon to polluters on a carbon market; and use the proceeds
to drive massive expansion of “shellfish-for-shell” cultivation.
Thanks to modern cultivation methods like semi-submersed long-lines
which can withstand rough sea conditions, the cultivable area
could be expanded exponentially. If we aim to double shell production
each year, then in year 5 we could be sequestering 30 million
tonne, and by the end of year 10 we will have already permanently
removed 1.8 billion tonne of carbon from the atmosphere and
will have an industry capable of removing 1 billion
tonne of carbon from the atmosphere each year
thereafter (which also provides 150 million tonne
of highly nutritious shellfish meat each year).
If we are willing to contemplate planting a
trillion trees [see
https://www.1t.org/
and https://trilliontrees.org/]
knowing both that (i) trees cannot solve the excess CO2
problem for the long term, and (ii) that we
do not have enough land to grow food, then
surely, we should be willing to contemplate developing towards
300 billion hectares of coastal water production of animals
that will permanently remove CO2 from our atmosphere.
The mollusks have no need for irrigation, food or fertiliser.
At the moment, farming shellfish for food usually involves little
intervention (beyond provision of habitats and, where necessary,
protection of larvae and juveniles from predation in ‘nurseries’)
and can be combined with restoration and conservation of overfished
fisheries. There is little or no conflict with other aquatic
activities. About 70% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water,
we might as well use a small part of it to rescue our tortured
atmosphere.
It’s not our intention to create monocultures. We discuss Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture at some length in our (open access) published papers (see Moore, https://doi.org/10.29267/mxjb.2021.6.1.31; Heilweck & Moore (2021), https://doi.org/10.29267/mxjb.2021.6.1.92; Moore (2021), https://doi.org/10.29267/mxjb.2021.6.1.129; Petros et al. 2021, https://doi.org/10.29267/mxjb.2021.6.2.1). Don’t think about filling the ocean with mussel farms. Think about seeding the oceans with appropriately designed communities of organisms that will support the basic need: which is to cultivate shellfish for their shells and take whatever else they offer, human food (and/or animal feed), reef-building, coastline protection, pollution-filtration, coral reef reconstruction, etc., as valuable by-products.
Yes, that phrase is in the introduction of our latest manuscript
[Moore et al. 2023,
https://rocsinternational.com/resources/Assessment-ocean-calcifiers-carbon-sequester-PREPRINT.pdf].
We think it is important that we regulate the phraseology we
use to avoid thoughts that, with climate change,
humanity might be faced by a circumstance that humans are powerless
to control (because humanity is not powerless). For several
decades, psychologists and behavioural scientists have been
studying the psychology of, and human behavioural responses
to, CO2-induced climatic change (for example Fischhoff,
1981, URL for PDF download:
https://tinyurl.com/23vfwf2c)
because “There is some research evidence that people stop
paying attention to climate change when they realize there is
no easy solution for it.” [source: Marshall, 2015, page
79 of chapter 16 (full citation below)].
This is because of a subconscious human mechanism whereby we
avoid uncomfortable emotions by rejecting facts that are too
unpleasant to act on. The human brain seems to be hardwired
to give more attention to negative items of information because
they might cause physical harm to the individual. It is called
natural negativity bias. For ancestral humans
negativity bias provided a selective advantage “seek out and
give more attention to negative information to avoid injury”.
But, in the modern world, negativity bias reduces the attention
we give to positive information and thereby reduces our
apparent choices for action.
In today’s digital world, the situation is even worse because
so much of the information we consume is delivered to us on
our various devices through software algorithms that tailor
your information stream to your “personal interests”. If you
seek out information about wildfires in California because that’s
where grandma lives, those algorithms feed
you similar links, and the more such links to which you give
your attention, the more the algorithm finds for you. It’s just
being supportive, but “…you keep scrolling and scrolling. Many
think that will be helpful, but they end up feeling worse afterward”;
it’s called doomscrolling [
https://www.health.com/mind-body/what-is-doomscrolling].
A 2019 National Academy of Sciences study found that
doomscrolling can be linked to a decline in both mental and
physical health [Soroka et al, 2019,
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1908369116].
Fortunately, there’s another, more encouraging
quotation: “Evolutionary psychology highlights
that imitating others is [an] efficient [strategy]. Among social
animals, following the majority is good for learning and survival.
… … But imitation isn’t fate. We can choose differently.
So maybe there are smart ways to start harnessing the evolutionary
force for imitation for climate action rather than the opposite.”
[source: Stoknes, 2015, chapter 3, page 31 (full citation below)].
Always remember this: imitation isn’t your inevitable fate.
You can choose not to follow the herd.
PODCAST
Check out this BBC Sounds Podcast why Do We Doomscroll? [https://rocsinternational.com/resources/WhyDoWeDoThat-20221230-WhyDoWeDoomscroll.mp3].
BOOKS:
Marshall, G. (2015), Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our
Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change. Bloomsbury Publishing
Plc, New York, 272 pp. ISBN: 9781632861023. Stoknes, P.E. (2015),
What We Think about When We Try Not to Think about Global
Warming: Toward a New Psychology of Climate Action. Chelsea
Green Publishing Co, White River Junction, VT, USA, 320 pp.
ISBN: 9781603585835.